


high hopes for a living

by ilgaksu



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Leia is raised by the Skywalkers, Prince Luke Skywalker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 12:10:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15096425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: The weight of a lightsaber in her hands is comforting in a way she didn’t expect. The thrum of it under her skin feels like a homecoming. She looks up to meet Ben Kenobi’s gaze.And just like that, the universe falls into place.





	high hopes for a living

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smolmecha](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=smolmecha).



The story goes like this. Padme Amidala Naberrie - once a Queen of Naboo, once a Senator, once a girl dressed as a dancing flame, smiling at a frightened little boy - dies on Polis Massa. The news races through the galaxy faster than sound, something a little closer to light. She is buried surrounded by flowers, her face waxen and perfect, heavy with child. In this way, like all good leaders of state, she dies with her secrets intact. The twins are divided, severed - split apart like the dividing cells that had turned them into two separate and separable beings. One is taken to Tatooine. The other, Alderaan. Obi-Wan Kenobi - the corners of his mouth already pressing downwards, like a succumbing to gravity, to inevitability - hands one of the children over. Mouth open, quiet with wonder, the baby stares into the face of Bail Organa, whose hands were already outstretched to receive him. For a moment, they just look at each other, suspended in the moment. His Serene Highness, that same serenity melting away - felled by the blood of his dead friend. Organa’s expression does something like a tremble but slower. An echo.

“He has his mother’s eyes,” Organa manages, finally.

“Yes,” Obi-Wan replies, “Yes, I think he does.”

On Tatooine, the sandstorm whips around Obi-Wan’s ankles, lashes against his face in great pealing beats, threatens to distend its jaws and swallow him whole. For a moment, he stands there,  eyes half-closed against the glare of two suns, wondering, what if he -

What if he just -

The girl cries, her tiny face scrunched up in a yowl. It’s a demand. It breaks the fog in his head open again. He keeps walking.   

“Whatever you say, princess,” he mumbles. The words are snatched out of his mouth and devoured by the storm - as though never said.

 

*

 

Leia Skywalker, nineteen years old and headstrong as they come, spits on the ground in front of the neighbourhood boys when she passes. She has to pull down the scarf protecting the lower half of her face from the sand, but sacrifices have to made for the sake of a greater cause. You know how it goes.

“Junkrat,” one of them manages to cough up in reply. “Bitch,” is another offering. They’re just bitter they lost to her in the last pod-race - she’s heard them bitching to themselves, amongst themselves, about the juiced-up contraption she spliced together out of scouring junkyards. They haven’t had the courage to call her a cheat to her face yet, but it’s coming. It’s easier for her to be conning them than for them to admit they’re incompetent.

“Keep trying, boys,” she tells them, and ducks under the bazaar’s canopies. Stops at one of the stalls.

“I’m here to pick up an order for my uncle,” she tells them, adjusting the homemade blaster strapped to her hip. “Owen Lars? Come on, he put  the request in last week, how does it need - can’t you make it snappy?” It’s a demand. “It’s nearly noon, and I have shit to do. I’m heading out to Tosche Station after this. Gotta pick up some power converters.”

 

*

 

The weight of a lightsaber in her hands is comforting in a way she didn’t expect. The thrum of it under her skin feels like a homecoming. She looks up to meet Ben Kenobi’s gaze.

And just like that, the universe falls into place.

 

*

 

It turns out the Prince of Alderaan has the face of a farm boy, the smile of a propaganda poster, and is better with a blaster than Leia would have guessed just from taking a look at him. And he’s so _sincere._ It’s a lot to take in, admittedly, like having a tracking beam fully trained on to you every time you’re faced with the strange and strangely familiar enormity of Luke Organa’s full attention.

Han Solo is a different matter entirely. After they get through everything, leave the wreckage of the Death Star floating in space, Luke gives them medals for heroism, smiles for the Rebellion, and then spends the next week secluded in his rooms, refusing to see a single soul. R2-D2 is the single exception, bleeping sadly at her whenever she tries to get him to pass on a message.

“Give him time,” C-3PO translates, his head bobbing apologetically.  

“He’s a prince,” Leia mutters, “He _doesn’t have time_ for this,” and storms off.  

She can’t understand how someone could allow themselves to disappear into loss like that. Every time she’s tempted to herself, she tells herself how much there is left to do, and pushes it all back. Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru, Ben. Remembering them is like pressure on a bruise.

“He’s not a prince of anything anymore, sweetheart,” Han reminds her, leaning back against the railing, there at her side. Uninvited. He’s uninvited. Has he found her just to get his own word in? Of course he has.

The endearment catches on the air. It snags at her. She mistakes the feeling for annoyance. None of the boys back on Tatooine were stupid enough to call her sweet - the shock of it is something she rolls around in her mouth, forming the words to reply.

There’s been enough of that kind of talk, endearments dripping off of tongues in the local cantinas - ever since she fell out of her borrowed X-wing and into the arms of strangers, holding her aloft for doing what ought to have been impossible, but somehow hadn’t been. There’s a lot of men, a lot of women, a lot of everyone wanting to grab a piece of the new Resistance heroine, the new hope, and hold on. She’s become a talisman overnight.   

(When her hand had been on the trigger, Ben’s voice clear as day, she wasn’t sure which of them had had the thought that she must pull it, and do it now, or never do it - only that she did, and watched the shot hit its mark, and everything her father’s murderer had built had burned. The Force is real. She’s sure of it, certain with a zeal bordering on the fanatic. She sees the knowledge glowing behind her eyes when she looks at her reflection. The Force is real. _I am a Jedi, like my father before me._ )

“I suppose you’ll be giving him that medal back then,” Leia snipes. “If it’s worth so little to you.”

Han smiles, slow and full-toothed. She turns to look back out at the skyline.

“I don’t think so. Friends in high places are useful when you’re in the gutter. Besides,” his laugh is a bark, sudden and loud, “It’ll buy my way out of something one day, prince or no prince. I checked it afterwards. Gold-titanium blend. It’s the real deal.”  

“If you stayed, you wouldn’t need to barter over your future,” she tells him crisply. “You must know that by now.”

“I’m not the kind of guy who stays around for too long. Nothing to get used to, nothing to miss.”

“Just admit you aren’t brave enough to stay.”

The silence after this stretches out so long that she gives in to it and looks up, over at him. He’s already gone. She grits her teeth, glares out at the skyline, feeling abruptly helpless.

It’d be better for her not to bother. Han Solo is a stupid decision.

 

*

 

After nineteen years washed up on Tatooine, Hoth should be a welcome relief. After three years, Leia keeps catching herself thinking of what Han said, back on Yavin IV. _Nothing to get used to, nothing to miss._ In her dreams, she dreams of the restless, rising shift of sand over the horizon. The warm, smooth grit of it sliding through her fingers. She has forgotten the chafing and the parching, all of it whisked out of her brain by the wind-chill and the threat of frostbite if she so much as takes a step outside of the base. Luke stepped out of his rooms after that week of keeping his own silence, and his smile sings of hope and hometowns and a world where prophecies come to pass: it’s only from the close quarters they’ve kept over the past few years that Leia can see the strain there. It’s hard being the heroes. Leia thinks back to her younger self - hellbent on some kind of glory, certain that she was special, meant for beyond the two suns she had always known - and almost laughs. Be careful what you wish for.

Han is still here. The surprise of it has worn off. Just as she’d first thought: he’s all talk. And at the same time, nothing like she’d first thought, corralling him in that cantina on Mois Eisley: there’s the bones of a good man, under all that bluster and bravado.

Han Solo is still a stupid decision. The cold is getting to her. He’s getting to her. It’s a war of attrition. Rock, meet hard place. Let the battle of wills commence. The other day, she’s pretty sure she heard Luke snort out loud as he passed them squabbling in the mess hall of the base. But of course, when she turned to him, he pulled out those baby blues, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth act - the one that has half the X-wing squadron plastering the posters of him all over their bunks. Leia isn’t falling for that shit. She remembers the steely look in his eyes after the fall of Alderaan, and she knows how it’s never really left. He’s just drawn his mask down over it.

There are posters of her now, too. Luke had insisted, with a sly look, something about boosting morale and making a statement to the universe. All that kind of pretty bullshit. She’d let herself get roped in anyway, wanting to stick it to Vader. She wants him to know she’s coming for him. She wants him to hear her name - Leia Skywalker - so he’ll remember what he did, so he’ll see the father she never knew, so he’ll see Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru and Ben and all of them, all the blood he’s up to the neck in.

Even though Han couldn’t keep himself from jibing at her about them once they started going up around the place, he doesn’t even spare them a glance when she’s right there in front of him, and that’s -

That means something more than it’s supposed to. To her, at least. Right now, though, all that good feeling is lost in favour of the burning urge to - to  -

“Oh, go on, then,” she sneers at him. She can’t even recall what it is they’re bickering over this time, only that it is very, very important that she wins. What kind of rebel backs off from a brawl? She was raised better than that. “Go off. Be an idiot. That’s nothing new.”

“That’s nothing new?” Han almost sounds offended. One of the engineers walks between them on her way to the loading bay, but Leia keeps her glare firmly pinned to Han’s expression. She finds she couldn’t tear her gaze away if she tried.

“I’m used to you.”

It’s not the words she planned to use, and this part comes out softer than she expected. She is standing closer than she expected. This is all unexpected, only for how it isn’t - only for how it feels like gravity.

“Aw, what the hell,” Han says, half under his breath, like he’s losing some kind of internal battle. Then, he kisses her. It’s nothing spectacular, Leia insists to herself, but she dissolves into it all the same.

Of course, it’s then that the alarms start to blare. Han pulls away. She scowls at him.

“You’re finishing what you started when you get back,” she says. He laughs. It’s a nice laugh. She can feel herself getting hooked on it.  

“Nothing to get used to, nothing to miss,” he replies. She turns on her heel. The loading bay doors are to her left, Resistance pilots racing at full blast through to get to their ships. The weight of the lightsaber at her hip, the shadow of a kiss on her mouth: talismans for a talisman. Something a lot like hope crackles in her chest.

And she begins to run.  


End file.
